Exit Signs I Missed (A Dark Artifices Fanfiction) ✔️

I Can Never Keep My Eyes Off This

Julian could not sleep, but he was the sort of tired that stripped away everything from a person except long-inscribed, deeply-ingrained habit, and this was his: Looking desperately for a way out.

Not a way out of danger, or out of depression as most might think, but a door marked exit - to him - would be the possibility of being with Emma, in every way possible. To be able to love her, not only as a parabatai or as a best friend, but as a boyfriend would. It would mean that any touch between them, any physical contact, would be more than the pragmatic drawing of runes or tending of scars, more than helping each other up in battle or lending strength and balance. He would be able to touch her because he wanted to, slide fingers through her hair because he was in awe of the kaleidoscope of golden and amber and brown that it was, press parts of him against parts of her, just to see the pleasure that it stoked in her body, to hear it in the cadences of moans and gasps and sighs. He would be able to do all the things he had done before and could never do again.

The Law was the same; it never gave him the answer he so desperately sought. It was, after all, the Law. The Law would not bend or break or yield to love, no matter how strong, no matter how right it felt, no matter what Julian wanted.

Sed lex, dura lex.

The Law is hard, but it is the Law.

He went back to bed, pulling the sheets tight against his body as if he were trying to keep something out. Bad dreams, perhaps, because bad dreams brought thoughts of Emma and how her presence chased them away, but tonight her presence would only be more that he could not have, a temptation that did not love him back, a drug that would never give him the high he was chasing, though she was a drug that he chased anyways. Tonight she could only bring him pain, could only give him all that he wanted just out of reach, making Julian a modern-day Tantalus with Emma as his sustenance.

She was what he loved most, and all that he could not have. Like sleep, she was a breath away and impossible to reach.

Julian pulled the sheets over his head to keep out bad thoughts.

:::

"And here I thought you preferred the company of your princess," Kieran made his presence unannounced, appearing suddenly behind them as only faeries could, in a way that Shadowhunters, for all their training, could never quite match. It was another reminder that Mark Blackthorn was different, only half-fey, that some great chasm had opened between them, growing more insurmountable every day.

Emma Carstairs slid off of the bike and glared at him, arms crossed over her chest. "Emma, stay," Mark commanded.

The blonde spitfire looked at him with the same angry expression she had given Kieran. "Since you seem to think I'm going to sit, roll over and play dead, I have to warn you. My bite is worse than my bark."

"I like her," Kieran told Mark, gauging his reaction. "And before you do what an awful lot of what you humans do, which would be to advise on the dangers of speaking about you as if you are not present, please allow me to inform you of my knowledge of your presence."

"That was an annoyingly long sentence." Emma turned to Mark, and Kieran hurt.

It was funny, really, how after what mortals coined a "breakup", the ones in the former relationship seemed to lose all the emotion they previously felt for one another - until all that was left was an ocean's worth of pain. This certainly seemed to be such a situation, and the same feelings were present. The Shadowhunter girl should not have created such agony, should not have been the cause of what felt like a thousand faerie steeds stampeding over Kieran's heart - yet she was. She was mortal, and that should have meant nothing, but instead it meant everything. It meant that Mark was the same as her when he had once been the same as Kieran. Yet still, there it was, the stark reminder that Mark was still the same, in their eyes: no longer twins of each other but twins of two boys who loved with all the stars watching, only he was not the same as Kieran anymore.

Mark was all under the wild great expanse of the universe and sky and galaxy that Kieran loved, and Mark did not love him.

He was broken, and broken things were sharp.

"Well, you are surprisingly annoying for being so small," he informed her. She looked as if she were searching for a weapon absentmindedly, fingers never straying far enough from a blade.

"Could the two of you please - " Mark stepped in between them. "I brought you - " Here he looked at Emma, who was glaring daggers and reaching for them - "Here so you could... So that the two of you might become friends."

"I have enough friends. He's dead faerie meat," the blonde told him bluntly, her blades sharp, yet her words sharper still.

"Why, are you suggesting that you did not to see me?" Kieran masked his words with nonchalance, because deception was not a poison he could choose (because desperation might reveal itself otherwise.) "Mark, are you stating that you have dragged your unfortunate girlfriend here so that we might become friends? What a fool's quest!"

"I was getting to that part." Mark looked irritated, though whether it was with Emma or Kieran, the faerie couldn't tell. "I did come here to see you. I miss you. Kieran, I love you."

Dreaming, he must be dreaming was the last thought in Kieran's mind.